[Epistemic status: mildly triggered, counterproductively(?) yucking other people’s yum, “guy who doesn’t get Petrov Day”]
The LW frontpage has something about a Petrov Day ceremony. A gippity summary tells me it has things like quotes about human technological advancement, candles that represent things, doing things with the candles that represent things, etc., or something like that. I’m somewhat allergic to “symbolizing”; see https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/05/rituals-and-symbolism.html. I think that rituals and traditions can appropriately have symbolic force, but only by being real actions that accomplish something, or such actions that have been ritualized (“stereotyped and exaggerated to strengthen an effect on observers that the original [object-level-functional] action already had”).
Here are some actions one might want to do on Petrov Day, off the top of my head:
Check that your “flee populated areas with enough supplies to get basic food and shelter for a while” plan is operational.
If your community has a nuclear shelter, the community refreshes it.
Think of a relationship in your life (of any kind) in which you feel the sense of a fog of war, a fragile quiet, the paranoia of ascribed adversariality, the possibility that you might launch a nuke so to speak, and/or the potential for very negative-sum outcomes. Take an action to try avoiding such outcomes; e.g. try to falsify some part of your ascription of adversariality, or try to figure out a way to disengage without launching the nuke.
Call a friend who’s somehow advancing AI capabilities and plead with them to stop / speak up / etc. Or call your rep, or your friend in China. Remember that they too are of the same species as Arkhipov and Petrov. Despite Sinclair’s Razor, and Dario the Hypnotoad, and the West / China civilizational estrangement, and all that, people still have a love and loyalty to the human species—they don’t want to see the whole world burn.
Surely there are better ones, but I just mean to gesture at the idea. Thoughts?
FWIW, I don’t think “hello, I took a holiday and attempted to build rituals that were meaningful to me” is “yucking other people’s yum.” I think it would be cool and interesting for someone to run a reform Petrov Day that tries some of these ideas.
[Epistemic status: mildly triggered, counterproductively(?) yucking other people’s yum, “guy who doesn’t get Petrov Day”]
The LW frontpage has something about a Petrov Day ceremony. A gippity summary tells me it has things like quotes about human technological advancement, candles that represent things, doing things with the candles that represent things, etc., or something like that. I’m somewhat allergic to “symbolizing”; see https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/05/rituals-and-symbolism.html. I think that rituals and traditions can appropriately have symbolic force, but only by being real actions that accomplish something, or such actions that have been ritualized (“stereotyped and exaggerated to strengthen an effect on observers that the original [object-level-functional] action already had”).
Here are some actions one might want to do on Petrov Day, off the top of my head:
Check that your “flee populated areas with enough supplies to get basic food and shelter for a while” plan is operational.
If your community has a nuclear shelter, the community refreshes it.
Think of a relationship in your life (of any kind) in which you feel the sense of a fog of war, a fragile quiet, the paranoia of ascribed adversariality, the possibility that you might launch a nuke so to speak, and/or the potential for very negative-sum outcomes. Take an action to try avoiding such outcomes; e.g. try to falsify some part of your ascription of adversariality, or try to figure out a way to disengage without launching the nuke.
Call a friend who’s somehow advancing AI capabilities and plead with them to stop / speak up / etc. Or call your rep, or your friend in China. Remember that they too are of the same species as Arkhipov and Petrov. Despite Sinclair’s Razor, and Dario the Hypnotoad, and the West / China civilizational estrangement, and all that, people still have a love and loyalty to the human species—they don’t want to see the whole world burn.
Surely there are better ones, but I just mean to gesture at the idea. Thoughts?
FWIW, I don’t think “hello, I took a holiday and attempted to build rituals that were meaningful to me” is “yucking other people’s yum.” I think it would be cool and interesting for someone to run a reform Petrov Day that tries some of these ideas.
(I meant more just my first paragraph; it’s critical of the rituals described on the front page without engaging much.)