When Stanislav Petrov's missile alert system pinged, the world was not watching. Russia was not watching. Perhaps a number of superiors in the military were staying in the loop about Stanislav's outpost, waiting for updates. It wasn't theatre.

In contrast, LessWrong's historical Petrov Day celebrations have been pretty flashy affairs. Great big red buttons, intimidating countdown timers, and all that. That's probably not what the next "don't destroy the world" moment will look like.

It's also the case that some of the biggest moral dilemmas don't come clearly labeled as such, and don't have the options clearly marked as "cooperate" or "defect". (I think in Petrov's case, it was clear it was a big decision. Unclear to me how it easy it was for him to make and why.)

Matching the spirit of the above, this year's LessWrong commemoration was a little more one-on-one. It started with a poll. In previous year's, the LessWrong team has unilaterally decided the meaning of Petrov Day, often facing objections. So why not get a sense of what people actually think matters most?

We sent the following private message to anyone who'd been active on LessWrong in the previous 24 hours:

252 people responded to the survey at the time I started work on this post, and the results are pretty clear:

The Most Important Value of Petrov Day

Note: We did not actually spend much time thinking about the options in this poll, their framing, etc. Like under 10 minutes. Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Virtue	Num	Percent
Avoiding actions that noticeably increase the chance that civilization is destroyed	144	57%
Accurately reporting your epistemic state	27	11%
Quickly orienting to novel situations	25	10%
Resisting social pressure	56	22%
Total	252	100%

Results are not significantly different for users with 1000+ karma:

Virtue	Num	Percent
Avoiding actions that noticeably increase the chance that civilization is destroyed	35	49%
Accurately reporting your epistemic state	8	11%
Quickly orienting to novel situations	8	11%
Resisting social pressure	56	28%
Total	107	100%

Unilaterally pushing your own values over the collective?

I don't know whether what really was going on was genuinely idealistic as opposed to symmetrical fighting over resources, but a lot of the US<>Russia conflict seemed to be about values and beliefs about what was right. Capitalism, communism, etc.

This raises some good questions. What are the legitim...

Ruby's Quick Takes

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Ruby's Quick Takes

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