Remembering that humanity is fragile, and that we have come close to destruction in the past, and will likely come close to destruction in the future.
This sounds like it’s pretty well captured by current Petrov Day ritual, yeah, though I feel like it only being the front page rather than all of LW makes it feel much less serious.
Practicing the virtue of not taking unilateral action
Doesn’t Petrov’s choice actually get closer to taking than not taking unilateral action, though? The current ritual captures “think carefully about your actions”, yes, but as I understand it Petrov was supposed to report a missile launch to his superiors. who could in principle also have used their judgment to dismiss it as a false alarm.
He did the right choice, no doubt, but it feels weird to use “saw an event that could have led to the end of the world, made a choice that involved going against his standing orders and the previous planning that many others had participated in, ultimately making the decision purely himself rather than communicating it to the people with the pre-designated authority to deal with it” as a symbol of coordination and avoiding unilateral action.
Sorry, after thinking about this, I basically think that “unilateral action” is just a confusing choice of words. Let’s replace it with “being given substantial purely destructive power, and wielding that power responsibly,”, because I think while there was a substantial unilateral component to the cold war, I don’t think Petrov’s choice in particular was that reliant on unilateral considerations.
This sounds like it’s pretty well captured by current Petrov Day ritual, yeah, though I feel like it only being the front page rather than all of LW makes it feel much less serious.
I mean, I think taking all of LessWrong down would be a bit of a dick move. Like, the frontpage is what matters most to the people who participate and is a resource that feels fair and reasonably to destroy, because it being down mostly just costs the people who participate in the ritual.
But I feel like as a developer on LessWrong I have a pretty serious responsibility to be a good shepherd of content, and to make sure that you can reliably link to LessWrong content, and that you can reliably read the sequences, without it breaking. Most of the people who read that content aren’t regular users, they are people who got linked here from some other blogpost on the internet, and I don’t want to externalize our bad decisions into giving them a bad experience.
I think in general, I wouldn’t want to run rituals like this that randomly damage some public infrastructure. Like, I wouldn’t want to make it so that when someone presses a button, we barricade a random road in Berkeley. Making all the content on LessWrong inaccessible feels similar to that. It’s not my right to remove people’s access to that.
This sounds like it’s pretty well captured by current Petrov Day ritual, yeah, though I feel like it only being the front page rather than all of LW makes it feel much less serious.
Doesn’t Petrov’s choice actually get closer to taking than not taking unilateral action, though? The current ritual captures “think carefully about your actions”, yes, but as I understand it Petrov was supposed to report a missile launch to his superiors. who could in principle also have used their judgment to dismiss it as a false alarm.
He did the right choice, no doubt, but it feels weird to use “saw an event that could have led to the end of the world, made a choice that involved going against his standing orders and the previous planning that many others had participated in, ultimately making the decision purely himself rather than communicating it to the people with the pre-designated authority to deal with it” as a symbol of coordination and avoiding unilateral action.
Sorry, after thinking about this, I basically think that “unilateral action” is just a confusing choice of words. Let’s replace it with “being given substantial purely destructive power, and wielding that power responsibly,”, because I think while there was a substantial unilateral component to the cold war, I don’t think Petrov’s choice in particular was that reliant on unilateral considerations.
I mean, I think taking all of LessWrong down would be a bit of a dick move. Like, the frontpage is what matters most to the people who participate and is a resource that feels fair and reasonably to destroy, because it being down mostly just costs the people who participate in the ritual.
But I feel like as a developer on LessWrong I have a pretty serious responsibility to be a good shepherd of content, and to make sure that you can reliably link to LessWrong content, and that you can reliably read the sequences, without it breaking. Most of the people who read that content aren’t regular users, they are people who got linked here from some other blogpost on the internet, and I don’t want to externalize our bad decisions into giving them a bad experience.
I think in general, I wouldn’t want to run rituals like this that randomly damage some public infrastructure. Like, I wouldn’t want to make it so that when someone presses a button, we barricade a random road in Berkeley. Making all the content on LessWrong inaccessible feels similar to that. It’s not my right to remove people’s access to that.