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 notice that there's a part of me which gets annoyed, borderline upset when I hear this Petrov Day ritual discussed in this manner.
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. As it feels like the symbolic thing is distracting from things that actually matter.
That by itself wouldn't trigger the reaction; the world is full of purely symbolic gestures that are claiming to make a difference, but they mostly haven't upset me in a long time. Some of the communication around Petrov Day has. I think it's because of a sense that this idea is being pushed on people-that-I-care-about as something important despite not actually being in accordance to their values, and that there's social pressure for people to be quiet about it and give in to the social pressure at a cost to their epistemics.
I feel like Oliver's comment is basically saying "people should have taken this seriously and people who treat this light-heartedly are in the wrong". It's spoken from a position of authority, and feels like it's shaming people whose main sin is that they aren't particularly persuaded by this ritual actually being significant, as no compelling reason for this ritual actually being significant has ever been presented.
As Chris notes, the communication around this has been contradictory, with some of it being presented as "this is just a game is good fun" and some "this is actually a thing to be taken seriously". That also feels like a catch-22, where it's implied that it's shameworthy to not have taken the game seriously, when people were simultaneously also given the signal that it's not serious.
I think that to a large extent, I stopped caring about meaningless rituals being pushed within my ingroup because I stopped considering my ingroup to include the kinds of groups that were pushing the rituals. But Chris feels like part of my ingroup, and now I feel upset again because I feel he's being punished unfairly.
Chris wrote a comment saying this
Well, it was just a game and I had other things to do.
Before I strong-upvoted it, the comment was down at -11 karma. I read that as Chris being punished, for making a statement that feels like exactly correct to the part of my that feels upset.
Now it may be the case - a more agreeable part of me wants to interject - that this ritual actually is important, and that it should be treated as more than just a game.
But.
If so, I have never seen a particularly strong case being made for it. (Nor even the intention being communicated clearly.) It feels like it was just arbitrarily decided, then imposed on the site from a position of authority, using that position of authority to suppress dissent and strongarm people into acting in accordance with the ritual. There's a sense of "maybe this is important and maybe not, but you don't get to just declare it important and require people to act accordingly".
And that's why that part of me feels upset about this.
I think it's a reasonable Fermi estimate. That said, people would be willing to pay a lot more for Facebook. Doesn't mean it's more valuable.
"Do you think most websites should be randomly down for a day?" - well, it's not just down for no reason. It'd also serve as a reminder of the importance of existential risk. And then people would be able to read about who took it down and possibly why afterwards. There could be significant utility from reading the post-mortem.
But I guess my true rejection is that I saw it as just a game and I assumed that you wouldn'... (read more)
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 the 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 to insist that they had to engage with the game in the same way as me, when it was really their choice.
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, I don't think that the purpose of this experiment was 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?