I feel like this has unintentionally brought us closer to Petrov's actual experience.
This tradition has so far consisted of leaving the button alone, with no incentives to push it beyond the ubiquitous temptations of pushing buttons and/or trolling. But that is not what happened to Petrov.
Petrov received a message telling him to push the button or the Bad Thing would happen.
Petrov thought the message looked legit, but noticed there were clues that it wasn't.
Petrov had little time to make the decision.
He went with the clues and we lived. Chris didn't and we metaphorically died.
We are still unequal to Petrov, for now.
I feel like this has unintentionally brought us closer to Petrov's actual experience.
Unintentionally?!?
I am probably not following this as closely as many commenters here, but I 100% assumed it was intentional. It's just so good!
This brings me to Oliver Habryka's comment:
> To be clear, while there is obviously some fun intended in this tradition, I don't think describing it as "just a game" feels appropriate to me. I do actually really care about people being able to coordinate to not take the site down. It's an actual hard thing to do that actually is trying to reinforce a bunch of the real and important values that I care about in Petrov day. Of course, I can't force you to feel a certain way, but like, I do sure feel a pretty high level of disappointment reading this response.
[Epistemic-emotional status: reporting an emotional reaction, which may or may not have correct reasoning; attempting to honor the emotional tone of that reaction without actually wanting to be confrontational about this. Important note: when I say that it feels like people are being shamed, I do not mean think that anyone actually intends to shame people; it's that I feel that that's what the tone will communicate to many, intentionally or not. I could be wrong about that too. Again, trying to fairly report the implicit model that one part of me has, without asserting that the model is necessarily fully correct.]
So I noti...
Yeah, I think this is a reasonable reaction, and I really appreciate you going in-depth on your reaction here. And maybe the right call is to basically not have any shared rituals and traditions that have a shared sense of importance, which feels to me like the western secular default.
But, I don't know, that does leave me feeling pretty empty and sad, and I notice that if I don't have an active and strong culture around me, that I just default to whatever other random culture around me does have any content, even if I don't really like the ideas of that culture, and it feels like a pretty major loss to me. I do think that culture is really important, and shared rituals and traditions and games like these feel like how you actually build a culture that has any substantial content. And I really like Petrov Day. I consider it and Solstice to be the two primary holidays we have that we get to shape to reinforce our shared values and ideals, and want us to make use of them.
Like, I do think it's important that we try our best to only send the invites to people who are up for taking this seriously, and it should be easy to opt-out. I think we should improve the communication t...
Hey, I'm relieved and grateful that you took this so well. :) I hesitated for a while before posting my comment. I get that this ritual was important for you and didn't want to disrespect that; probably also didn't speak up last year because I wasn't sure I could communicate it in a good way.
I totally get the desire for rituals, and think it's an important one; I haven't been to a Solstice but I appreciate what they're doing. I also don't have a problem with them, maybe because they don't feel like they are trying to claim anything that they're not.
Generally most of my problem with this ritual was a) some aspects of its execution, such as the communication, which is fixable, and b) the feeling that it's actually not very analogous to the dilemma it's trying to be symbolic for, and which it claims to be training people in. (I said a few words about that in the final paragraph of my response to lionhearted.) I think that if it really felt to me like it was teaching people to be more trustworthy and coordinate better in situations-like-the-one-Petrov faced, then I'd probably be very happy to have it around. I just don't feel like it's there... yet. :)
Great comment, naturally. I appreciate your epistemic status quite a bit.
I think I want to respond to the idea that it's contradictory and bad to signal that the Petrov Day button is serious and signal that it's fun. A few examples:
We often distinguish between safety critical and non-safety critical components. The latter make up about 95% of components in my business and in general the thing we care most about is average performance.
In safety critical components we care about the worst component (material / manufacturing defect etc.) in e.g. 1,000,000. Otherwise >1 in 1,000,000 brakes fail and the vehicle runs someone over or drives into a canal.
The examples that you give of jokey but serious things are almost all non-safety critical things (except the dominance contest but I think that's quite a different example). If I miss that embedded agency is about something serious then that doesn't really matter - someone who makes that mistake is probably not really who it is important to make understand. The overall effect of the series is the most important thing.
My impression is that the message you sent is great for average performance (and that the most natural way to read it is as you intended) but that it isn't optimised for communicating with the biggest exception in 270. The person who shares the least common knowledge about the ritual or reads the message the fastest or has the prior you mention or a p...
Hey - to preface - obviously I'm a great admirer of yours Kaj and I've been grateful to learn a lot from you, particularly in some of the exceptional research papers you've shared with me.
With that said, of course your emotions are your own but in terms of group ethics and standards, I'm very much in disagreement.
The upset feels similar to what I've previously experienced when something that's obviously a purely symbolic gesture is treated as a Big Important Thing That's Actually Making A Difference.
On the one hand, you're totally right. On the other hand, basically the entire world is made up of abstractions along these lines. What can the Supreme Court opinion in Marbury vs Madison be recognized as other than a purely symbolic gesture? Madison wasn't going to deliver the commissions, Justice Marshall (no relation) knew that for sure, and he made a largely symbolic gesture in how he navigated the thing. It had no practical importance for a long time but now forms one of the foundations of American jurisprudence effecting, indirectly, billions of lives. But at the time, if you dig into the history, it really was largely symbolic at the time.
The world is built out of all sorts of ab...
Thanks for engaging :) My upset part feels much calmer now that it has been spoken for, so I'm actually pretty chill about this right now. You've had a lot of stuff that I've gotten value from, too.
Canonical reply is this one:
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pvim9PZJ6qHRTMqD3/p/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC
But note also that that post contains a lengthy excerpt about how the "Dark Side" descends into cultishness and insanity in situations where the word of leaders is accepted without question. That was clearly also depicted as the opposite failure mode.
I agree that rationalists don't cooperate enough, and that often just offer criticism when it's not warranted. But... it feels like a Fully General Counterargument if you take to that the point of "no coordination may be criticized, ever, including situation where people are arguably being shamed for having good epistemics". That sounds like this bit from the post:
...How do things work on the Dark Side?
The respected leader speaks, and there comes a chorus of pure agreement: if there are any who harbor inward doubts, they keep them to themselves. So all the individual members of the audience see this atmosphere of pure agreement, and they feel more
Good points.
I'll review and think more carefully later — out at dinner with a friend now — but my quick thought is that the proper venue, time, and place for expressing discontent with a cooperative community project is probably afterwards, possibly beforehand, and certainly not during... I don't believe in immunity from criticism, obviously, but I am against defection when one doesn't agree with a choice of norms.
That's the quick take, will review more closely later.
I want to point out a few things in particular. Firstly, the email was sent out to 270 users which from my perspective made it seem that the website was almost guaranteed to go down at some time, with the only question being when (I was aware game was played last year, but I had no memory of the outcome or the number of users).
I mean, this is a fine judgement to make, but also a straightforwardly wrong one. Last year we had ~150 people, and the site did not go down, with many people saying that we really have to add more incentives if we want to have any substantial chance of the site going down. I do think it's a pretty understandable mistake to make, but also one that is actually really important to avoid in real-life unilateralist situations.
Obviously, someone pressing the button wouldn't damage the honor or reputation of Less Wrong and so it seemed to indicate that this was just a bit of fun..
Of course it damaged our reputation! How could it not have? Being able to coordinate on this is a pretty substantial achievement, and failing on this is a pretty straightforwardly sad thing to happen. I definitely lost a good amount of trust in LessWrong, and I know of at least 10 other pe...
Of course it damaged our reputation! How could it not have? Being able to coordinate on this is a pretty substantial achievement, and failing on this is a pretty straightforwardly sad thing to happen.
I think this is only true conditional on the Petrov Day LW Button being a Serious Thing. But the whole question is whether or not we should consider it a Serious Thing in the first place. Outsiders likely won't, they'll just see it as a game.
More generally, the Schelling choice is rabbit not stag - where Rabbit is "don't take this seriously" and Stag is "do take this seriously". By putting this thing online and expecting everyone to take it seriously, but without providing a really solid justification for why they should, you're choosing Stag without prior coordination, which is generally a bad strategy.
(I also endorse Kaj and Neel's comments below).
I think this is only true conditional on the Petrov Day LW Button being a Serious Thing. But the whole question is whether or not we should consider it a Serious Thing in the first place.
Hmm, I do think this is right. But I do think the payoff matrix here is pretty asymmetric. Like, I think it's obvious that on-net, given reasonable levels of ambiguity, you will lose some reputation. There is a question of how much, but I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that you will lose some good amount, because at least some fraction of people will take it seriously.
Like, I do think that it's fine to push back and say that it should just be a game, and that the people who are taking it seriously are wrong, but as a statement about social reality, predicting that it will not cost you reputation just seems like a wrong prediction.
Like, I am fine with the statement that it shouldn't cost you reputation. But saying that it won't cost you reputation, feels pretty wrong.
I think we lose some reputation if people think that we are unable to choose Stag even in Serious Situations. But the main thing that signals to outsiders that this is a Serious Situation instead of a fun game is the disappointed reactions after someone chooses Rabbit. (By default outsiders are much less likely than insiders to think of this sort of thing as serious, and it was already ambiguous enough that many insiders didn't think of it as serious). If the community reaction was more like "What a great learning experience" and "This is a super interesting outcome" then I doubt there'd be a significant reputational cost. I'd estimate that the cost in weirdness points of running this event in the first place is about an order of magnitude higher.
An analogy: suppose the military practises a war game and sometimes fails to achieve its goal. I don't think this means they lose reputation. In fact, for certain classes of games, you lose more reputation by always succeeding in your goal, because that means that the goals are rigged. Same here: maybe the LW team sent out the invitations in such a way that they were very confident someone would push the button, or maybe in a way where they were very confident nobody would; I can't tell from the outside.
Yeah, to be clear, I do think it is actually a valuable signal to have failed at the Petrov Day goal at least once, because it signals pretty credibly that things are not rigged, and failure is possible.
I do also think that if you want your war game to be taken seriously as a sign of your competence, it's important that both you and the people you were war-gaming against were playing seriously. This doesn't mean that the war-game had to be a "Serious situation", but it does mean that your soldiers shouldn't have just gone "lol, it's just a game" and started playing cards or something because they got bored.
Like, sure, we could make this just a fun game, which would cause us to also not have to be worried about reputational risks, but I don't see much value in the version of this that is just a fun game, with no serious component. I am not super confident about the right balance of seriousness and fun, but I am pretty confident that a world where nobody took this seriously just doesn't seem very interesting to me. It doesn't allow me to build any real trust with anyone else, and feels like it deteroriates the real and important lessons we can learn from Petrov Day.
Thanks for writing this! It seemed like people were being unwarrantedly unfair to you in that thread.
My personal experience was getting the email from Ben, and this being the first I'd ever heard about LessWrong's approach to Petrov Day. And I somewhat considered pressing the button for the entertainment value, until I read the comments on the 2019 thread and got a sense of how seriously people took it.
I think it's completely reasonable to not have gotten that cultural context from the information available, and so not to have taken the whole thing super seriously.
And personally I found it fairly entertaining/education how all of this turned out (though it's definitely sad for all the Pacific time people who were asleep throughout the whole thing :( )
EDIT: Just wanted to add that, now I have the cultural context, I think this was all an awesome celebration and I'm flattered to have been invited to be a part of it! My main critique was that I think it's extremely reasonable for Chris not to have had the relevant context, but many of those commenting seem to have taken this background context as a given, since it's clear to them.
I'm genuinely confused about the "pressing the button for entertainment value".
The email contained sentences like:
Honoring Petrov Day: I am trusting you with the launch codes. [...] On Petrov Day, we celebrate and practice not destroying the world. [...] You've been given the opportunity to not destroy LessWrong. [...] if you enter the launch codes below on LessWrong, [you will remove] a resource thousands of people view every day.
And no sentences playfully inviting button-pressing.
Maybe I can't unsee the cultural context I already had. But I still imagine that after receiving that email, I'd feel pretty bad/worried about pressing.
We'll come to this in a moment, but first I want to address his final sentence: "Like, the email literally said you were chosen to participate because we trusted you to not actually use the codes". I've played lot of role-playing games back in my day and often people write all kinds of things as flavour text. And none of it is meant to be taken literally.
I want to point out a few things in particular. Firstly, the email was sent out to 270 users which from my perspective made it seem that the website was almost guaranteed to go down at some time, with the only question being when (I was aware the game was played last year, but I had no memory of the outcome or the number of users).
Beyond this, the fact that the message said, "Hello Chris_Leong" and that it was sent to 270 users meant that it didn't really feel like a personal request from Ben Pace. Additionally, note the somewhat jokey tone of the final sentence, "I hope to see you in the dawn of tomorrow, with our honor still intact". Obviously, someone pressing the button wouldn't damage the honor or reputation of Less Wrong and so it seemed to indicate that this was just a bit o...
I do not agree that the monetary value of this intervention is anywhere near that.
I didn't notice - I don't look at the front page, just using my bookmark to /allPosts. Many use GreaterWrong or RSS, and would be unaffected. Are there logs on how many actual visitors saw the front page down and did not hit any other pages until it was back up?
I'm a pretty heavy site user, and I would not pay $1 to have the site up a few hours or a day earlier in case of an outage. I'd likely pay on the order of $0.10-0.25/day on an annual basis if asked (and if it were a registered charity where I understood how my donation would be used), but having a day or two of downtime is just fine with me.
I'd especially not pay $1 to have the site be up sooner in case of a ritual/demonstration that is intentionally created by a site admin. If they think having the site down for a bit is a positive thing (indicated by the fact they wrote the code to do it), I defer to their wisdom.
To add some missing context to this:
-I'm part of the EA community and have been for several years. To the extent that you need a community member to blame for this, it is me. When doing this, I was operating under the belief that the community would be judging me personally, which is why I openly admitted to doing this on Facebook.
-I would have known about Petrov Day anyway regardless of Chris' message.
-Phishing attacks can often have in excess of 80% success rate. If you had received this, you would have likely entered the codes as well, even though everyone thinks that they wouldn't. Which is just one of the reasons why it doesn't make sense to punish recipients for making this kind of mistake.
-The campaign wasn't targeted at Chris, it was sent to lots of users. Retrospectively, I should have excluded Chris from the list of users. (I really regret not doing this, and I would like to apologise to Chris for this.)
Source please on the 80% success rate of many phishing attacks? This is at least an order of magnitude more than I would have predicted, it blows my mind!
Did a quick google. The only statistic I could find for how successful phishing attacks are is https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2019/09/04/sme-phishing-attacks/:
43% of UK SMEs have experienced a phishing attempt through impersonation of staff in the last 12 months. Of those impersonation phishing attempts, it was discovered that two-thirds (66%) had suffered a successful attack, according to CybSafe.
66% is still way more than I expect, but there's no verifiable source. (Looks like CybSafe has incentive to exaggerate the numbers.) And it's not clear whether this is "66% of phishing attempts were successful" or "of organizations targeted, 66% suffered at least one successful attack". Certainly it doesn't support "you would have likely entered the codes as well".
Strong-downvoted pdaa's comment pending source.
Yeah. If 80% is the true success rate I would not expect the world to look the way it does. I would expect such attacks to be incredibly rampant and somewhere near the front of everyone's minds, at least in the sense of when you get a call from an unknown number you think it's quite likely that it's something unsolicited.
Phishing attacks can often have in excess of 80% success rate. If you had received this, you would have likely entered the codes as well, even though everyone thinks that they wouldn’t. Which is just one of the reasons why it doesn’t make sense to punish recipients for making this kind of mistake.
Seconding Daniel's request for a source. But also, to clarify, does your attempt here count as one phishing attack in total, or one per message you sent?
If it's one per message, then 80% is double-plus-super-higher-than-predicted. But if it's one in total, then "you would have likely entered the codes as well" needs further justification. I said in the other thread that I wasn't super confident I wouldn't have fallen for it; but I don't think it's actively likely that I would have done, even taking your claim into account.
To the extent that you need a community member to blame for this, it is me. When doing this, I was operating under the belief that the community would be judging me personally
As a note, to the extent that you're trying to actively shoulder the blame here (rather than simply describing where you think it falls), this isn't a call you get to make. I'm not saying here that Chris does deserve blame; just that to the extent he does, you can't take that away from him onto yourself.
And... having this expectation seems like kind of the same sort of thing that went wrong with the admins' messaging? Like, on a high level you could describe what led to the site blowing up as: "the admins expected people to feel one way about a thing, and acted on that expectation, but some people felt a different way, and acted in ways that surprised the admins". Similarly, you may have expected us to feel one way about your actions, such that we judge you personally; but if some of us feel a different way, and judge differently, well...
You said you wanted this to be a learning opportunity for the community, and I think (despite varying levels of annoyance) we're overall taking it as such. To the extent that it's a learning opportunity for you as well, I hope you take it as such.
"The campaign wasn't targeted at Chris, it was sent to lots of users. Retrospectively, I should have excluded Chris from the list of users. (I really regret not doing this, and I would like to apologise to Chris for this.)" - I don't know why you wouldn't consider me fair game. You really don't need to apologise to me.
There seem to be multiple meta- games
To me Chris's story hears like [ press | game | cooperate | ? | ? | ]
Overall while I think there is a lot of value in having a community of people who do not press big red buttons, I also see a lot of value in noticing these other games and "cooperating" in them.
I've played lot of role-playing games back in my day and often people write all kinds of things as flavour text. And none of it is meant to be taken literally.
This line gave me an important insight into how you were thinking.
The creators were thinking of it as a community trust-building exercise. But you thought that it was intended to be a role-playing game. So, for you, "cooperate" meant "make the game interesting and entertaining for everyone." That paints the risk of taking the site down in a very different light.
And if there was a particular goal, instead of us being supposed to decide for ourselves what the goal was, then maybe it would have made sense to have been clear about it?
But the "role-playing game" glasses that you were wearing would have (understandably) made such a statement look like "flavor text".
At the same, the purpose of this experiment wasn't clear at all. I wasn't sure if it was having fun, increasing awareness or gaining insight into people's psychology.
Agreed. I was also provided with the codes, and to provide another data point, this is how I thought about it.
The terminal goal isn't to keep the site up. The question I (immediately) asked myself is whether entering the codes would make it more likely or less likely that people take xrisk seriously in the real world (roughly). I considered this briefly, but I realized that I too was confused about the point of the experiment, and thus decided to leave it alone.
Umm. Grudgingly upvoted.
(For real though, respect for taking the time to write an after-action report of your thinking.)
I was tricked by one of my friends:
Serious question - will there be any consequences for your friendship, you think?
Why would there be? I'm sure they saw it as just a game too and it would be extremely hypocritical for me to be annoyed at anyone for that.
Thanks, I'm glad to hear that. :) Also, very thankful that the LW community took this really well.
Beyond that, as for my motivations, aside from curiosity as to whether it would work, etc. I considered that it would be an interesting learning opportunity for the community as well. With actual nukes, random untrusted people also have a part to play. Selecting a small group of people tasked with trying to bring down the site might even be a good addition to future instances of Petrov Day.
For what it's worth, I took care to ensure that the damage from taking the site down would not be too great. The site was archived elsewhere, and the admins themselves accepted the risk of the site going down by starting this game. If this could have hurt people, I wouldn't have done it.
Beyond that, loyalty and trust are also very important to me. If the admins had trusted me with the launch codes, I wouldn't have nuked the site (intentionally).
After thinking more about this experiment, it has got me thinking about the payoff matrices. Is there anyone that would have pressed the button if there was guaranteed anonymity, and thus no personal cost? If so, make a second account - I'd be curious to hear your reasoning. Also, in this case there is no tangible benefit that anyone could get by nuking the site. How do we adapt this to situations where there is a benefit that can be gained by pressing the button?
P.S.: My offer still holds! Admins, if you're feeling adventurous, give me the codes next year and I'll prove that I won't use them!
Is there anyone that would have pressed the button if there was guaranteed anonymity, and thus no personal cost? If so, make a second account
If I understand you correctly, that won't work. The identity of the button-presser is not determined by which account pressed the button. It's determined by the launch code string itself -- everyone got a personalised launch code. (Which means that if someone stole and used your personalised code, you'd also get blamed -- but that seems fair.)
I think maybe 6-8, not sure. I was going to go further but the site went down too quickly. Users were selected based on having a large number of posts.
I wanted something to make it sound realistic. And rationalist/EA culture loves surveys and collecting data. :)
I am an outsider/lurker, so maybe I just don't get it, but it seems to me that even if the messaging around this event is changed to make it more clearly serious rather than there being a possible interpretation of all in fun no particular outcome is better than any other, there is a very real (not symbolic) mixed message going on with the way things are currently set up. The first message is hey, we're doing this really cool ritual and you are invited to participate. The second message is we don't want our website to go down so don't do anything (please don't participate).
This is completely outside the question of what the event actually symbolizes and so on. It's about, well, as far as I understand the simulacra model, it's about the simulacra level 1 aspects of the situation.
Someone who didn't check their email/messages would participate as desired.
There is no clear way to accept the invitation to participate in an active way without threatening the desired outcome.
Maybe this is the point. Maybe it's meant to be confusing. Maybe the people running the event are deliberately setting up a situation where they are sending mixed messages on purpo...
Additionally, note the somewhat jokey tone of the final sentence, "I hope to see you in the dawn of tomorrow, with our honor still intact". Obviously, someone pressing the button wouldn't damage the honor or reputation of Less Wrong and so it seemed to indicate that this was just a bit of fun..
Haha, I take this sentence like 90%-100% seriously. Don't you think you lost a little honor in the process? Wouldn't it be something if a decade down the line LessWrong could say "we've played this game for X years, including at least Y users every time and Z users total, and no one has ever entered their launch codes?
But alas...
Seriously: like lionhearted said, thanks for the postmortem! The thought process is important. Even if it meant some hurt feelings and a bit of inconvenience, we still got to learn something here. After all, learning something was the point, right? The more data we gather, the more likely we'll be better off in similar situations in other contexts.
I’m still processing my thoughts and feelings about this year’s Petrov Day, and what you did. It’s very late here, so I’ll write something tomorrow.
I think we should focus a little bit more on the behaviour of the other participants in this game. Coordinating in order not to have a catastrophic event happening is difficult and takes effort. And just hoping that nobody does anything foolish seems to be a strategy doomed to fail in the long run.
Therefore those other participants who took this experiment really seriously might have done much more to prevent this outcome. E.g. forming a small group, announcing that they are dedicated to the front page not being nuked and that everybody seriously thinking about pressing the button should talk about that first. If across the time zones such a group had formed then Chris might have been convinced not to do it.
I don't mean to belabor the point, but if this were meant as a deadly serious type of exercise I would have expected a much harsher penalty for submitting the launch codes. Why take just the home page down and not the rest of the site? Why only 24 hours? If it were a deadly serious type of exercise, I'd expect in the ballpark of taking down the whole site for a week to a month. I can also see taking it down for a year. Doing so would really hammer home how important xrisk is, which I think would be a very positive outcome and thus a potentially reasonable thing to do.
I have read about one possible case of false nuclear alarm which involveв something like fishing attack. Not sure if it was real or not, and I can't find the story now, but it could be real or could be creepypasta. Below is what I remember:
In 50s, nuclear-tipped US cruise missiles were stationed in Okinawa in several locations. One location got an obviously false (for some reasons) lunch command: the procedure was incorrect. They recognised it as false and decided to wait for clarification. But another location nearby recognised the command as legit and st...
At least you made it an actual game instead of a ritual. Thank you for this!
(Reading Faust is one thing, picking a side is another.)
I like to imagine a future LessWrong with 1 million users, and not one pressing the button. That would be very inspiring and a strong signal of being a high trust culture.
I read the email and the post, and the feeling of this "I do actually really care about people being able to coordinate to not take the site down. It's an actual hard thing to do that actually is trying to reinforce a bunch of the real and important values that I care about in Petrov day" wasn't really articulated anywhere.
I'm pretty sympathetic to this. I'm a LessWrong admin, last year on Petrov day, and someone had talked about selling codes, I considered my price. $10,000 is a meaningful some to me and I think was my thought. I don't remember what his f...
Yesterday I blew up the front page. This was unintentional. I was tricked by one of my friends:
In retrospect, this was quite silly of me. I actually noticed that the account was different from the one that sent the first message, which should have given it away, but the message really did feel legit so I trusted it anyway.
But beyond this, there were further details that should have made the message somewhat suspicious. The first is that this experiment occurred after midnight for San Fransisco. Given that most of the users on this site are based in the US, they wouldn't have been awake. While they might have specifically chosen users from suitable timezones, it would have made much more sense for them to just wait until more users woke up. Secondly, 20/30 users within 6 hours seems a bit high given that users weren't told in advance that the game was going on, so it's not clear how many would be available even if they knew.
One thing that greatly surprised me was how much the following comment was misunderstood:
People read the comment and assumed I was intending the press the button and the only different the trick meant was that it occurred earlier. One of the risks when writing comments quickly is that the meaning might not be very clear at all. I hadn't actually made up my mind about whether to push the button or not as I was waiting for comments to come in. All I had decided was that I didn't want the site to blow up while people were still asleep because I thought it'd be less fun for them. That said, I was entirely open to blowing up the site if I thought that the argument for was stronger than the argument against.
Ruby pointed out that I didn't spend as much thinking about this:
I saw the email notification almost immediately after it was sent and I thought about it for a bit before deciding that it really just felt legit. I considered messaging the mods, but I assumed they were asleep as it was like 2 am over there. The timestamps indicate that I only spent about seven minutes thinking about it, but it definitely felt longer.
I responded to Ruby with the following comment, which certainly wasn't the best comment that I've ever made.
I suppose the thing I should clarify about this comment is, "I didn't actually choose to play", as I did kind of choose to play by posting comments asking whether I should press the button on not. What I could have said if I had wanted to be more precise is that at most my commitment to engage was to read the comments that people posted and to take them into consideration. That is, to not waste the time of people who took the effort to reply.
I don't think I really had a duty to do anything further, including spending the full or most of the half an hour considering the decision. JacobJacob wants to draw a distinction between acting and not acting and I think that's fair enough for the original version of the game, but as soon as I received the email, the difference between acting and not acting collapsed, and the decision not to act would have been an action in and of itself.
This brings me to Oliver Habryka's comment:
We'll come to this in a moment, but first I want to address his final sentence: "Like, the email literally said you were chosen to participate because we trusted you to not actually use the codes". I've played lot of role-playing games back in my day and often people write all kinds of things as flavor text. And none of it is meant to be taken literally.
I want to point out a few things in particular. Firstly, the email was sent out to 270 users which from my perspective made it seem that the website was almost guaranteed to go down at some time, with the only question being when (I was aware the game was played last year, but I had no memory of the outcome or the number of users).
Beyond this, the fact that the message said, "Hello Chris_Leong" and that it was sent to 270 users meant that it didn't really feel like a personal request from Ben Pace. Additionally, note the somewhat jokey tone of the final sentence, "I hope to see you in the dawn of tomorrow, with our honor still intact". Obviously, someone pressing the button wouldn't damage the honor or reputation of Less Wrong and so it seemed to indicate that this was just a bit of fun.
But beyond this, I remember when I was a kid and I played games super seriously, while other kids just wanted to have some fun. And I was annoyed with them because I wanted to win, but I felt that others on my team were holding me back. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized I was wrong it insist that they had to engage with the game in the same way as me.
Now Habryka is annoyed because he was trying to run a specific experiment and that experiment wasn't, "Can people who kind of care about the game, but don't care too much get fooled into taking down the site". I can understand that, I imagine that this experiment took a lot of time to set up and he was probably looking forward to it for a while.
At the same, the purpose of this experiment wasn't clear at all. I wasn't sure if it was having fun, increasing awareness or gaining insight into people's psychology. I read the email and the post, and the feeling of this "I do actually really care about people being able to coordinate to not take the site down. It's an actual hard thing to do that actually is trying to reinforce a bunch of the real and important values that I care about in Petrov day" wasn't really articulated anywhere. And if there was a particular goal, instead of us being supposed to decide for ourselves what the goal was, then maybe it would have made sense to have been clear about it?