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 of fun..
I resonate with basically all of this from Chris’ post
Trying to introspect a bit more, I think that unseeing the cultural context is hard, and that that context massively affects your priors of how to interpret something like this. My first reaction was that the email was a joke. Then, realising it wasn’t a joke, being confused by why I’d been sent it (the email began Dear Neel_Nanda_1 , not Dear Neel, which made it seem less like I’d been specially chosen). And then, realising that they’d actually changed the Front Page, and done this before, being really entertained at the idea of celebrating Petrov Day in this way. But it felt like “this is a fun, slightly over the top way of celebrating, and we want to see interesting and fun things happen”.
I think my priors are so far from people taking something as minor as “the LW frontpage goes down for a day” seriously, that it took me reading the thread under jefftk last year about selling his launch codes for counterfactual donations, and seeing people genuinely debate “is this worth more than $1.6K” to realise that people took the symbolic value really seriously. (And I’m still pretty confused by this—if I had read about Petrov Day 2019, and saw that someone blew up the front page for a large donation to AMF, that would probably marginally raise my opinion of LessWrong. And I utterly do not understand people who would price as over $10K, let alone $1m)
Things that I think would have changed my intuitive framing:
Having the email drop out of “RPG flavour text mode” and be explicit about the cultural context and how seriously people took it
Having the downside be actually, meaningfully high (eg, LW the website going down for a month) ((though I think this is net bad for the obvious reasons)). As is, it didn’t feel like something to be taken seriously, because the actual stakes were low.
Being given context and invited before Petrov day, and needing to take some agency to accept. I think this would have made the notion of “you are being invited and trusted clearer”. I was surprised by receiving the email and don’t see myself as a notable LW contributor, and assumed eg this was automatically sent to the 270 most recent posters, or highest karma users or something, rather than having been hand-picked by Ben
(In writing all of this, I feel like I’m being unfair to Ben/implying all of this should have been obvious to you guys. That’s not at all my intent, and I hope you take this in the spirit of “an attempt to narrate my internal experience, that might help with orchestrating future things”)
Idk, hope all that helped. This kind of thing is far outside my standard conception of how people and communities work, and I’m not used to people taking symbols this seriously. And I’m surprised by how obvious this all feels to people with the cultural context
This comment helped me understand better what it looks like without the ‘cultural context’, thx.
Just to reply to one particular thing:
seeing people genuinely debate “is this worth more than $1.6K” [led me] to realise that people took the symbolic value really seriously
Do you agree that the literal monetary value of the site being down for a day is (likely) greater than that? Never mind the symbolism, there’s just like two thousand people who visit the Frontpage in a day, around half of whom might pay something in the range of $1-$10 for the site not to be randomly down on them for a day?
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.
You don’t look at the LW Frontpage, and neither do GW users or RSS users. This means you and they are outside the set of 2,000 daily visitors, so your lack of inconvenience is not evidence about theirs.
(I don’t have any logs, may look into getting some. As we don’t have that info our uncertainty around that should be factored into the estimate.)
You not wanting to pay $1 if the site was down is indeed a datapoint. I think many people would be fine with an outage. (I still think many would find it irritating.)
I understand that you especially wouldn’t in the case of the symbolism. I’m just trying to pin down the object level effects, to understand what was at stake before counting in all the symbolism.
Overall I’m not certain, it’s plausible the number is lower...
I don’t know how many of the 2000 would do the same thing but switching to GW for the day was fairly obvious to me. On the other hand I use GW on and off so this maybe gave me an advantage but I think the post on surviving the outage suggested doing that too. Short of checking GW traffic I guess it’s hard to know how many did this.
It is noteworthy that I think the sort of person who would bother to pay a dollar to keep the site up is also the sort of person who disproportionately might use greaterwrong (or, for that matter, the /allPosts page). The frontpage gets a lot of views but I think most of them are people who aren’t using LessWrong that seriously.
I said earlier to Ben I thought the $3k number was at least plausible and seemed within an order of magnitude of right. But thinking more I do suspect it’s on the lower end of that order of magnitude I think there’s only a few hundred users for whom the LessWrong frontpage is actually enough-better than whatever else they might be doing that day that they might pay a dollar.
If the entire site (not just the front page) was down, then I might on some days pay $1, if I was writing something where I wanted to cite/reference an older article. Otherwise, if I knew it would only last for a day, I would just wait it out.
Do you agree that the literal monetary value of the site being down for a day is (likely) greater than that? Never mind the symbolism, there’s just like two thousand people who visit the Frontpage in a day, around half of whom might pay something in the range of $1-$10 for the site not to be randomly down on them for a day?
Interesting. My intuition was “24 hours isn’t a long time, and it’s just the front page, people can surely come back later”. But while that’s a small inconvenience, $1 worth of inconvenience sounds plausible. So yeah, fair point! $1-10k actually seems like a fair value for this, thanks
EDIT: Reading the other comments on that point, it seems reasonable that LessWrong power users are best able to work around the outage, and the people who’d be most inconvenienced. And I expect most of those people to not know about GW (what is GreaterWrong anyway?), but this to correlate with caring less about the existence of LW. So I guess I’d lower the estimate a bit
https://greaterwrong.com is an alternate interface to LessWrong, implemented by… I think Clone of Saturn does most of the coding and Said Achmiz does most of the design work?
Same content, different design, slightly different set of features. (E.g. no karma change notification, no voting on tags, but comment navigation is improved.) I tend to use it over LW because it’s faster.
You can generally just replace lesswrong with greaterwrong in a URL.
As someone who didn’t receive the codes, but read the email on Honoring Petrov Day, I also got the sense it wasn’t too serious. The thing that would most give me pause is “a resource thousands of people view every day”.
I’m not sure I can say exactly what seems lighthearted about the email to me. Perhaps I just assumed it would be, and so read it that way. If I were to pick a few concrete things, I would say the phrase “with our honor intact” seems like a joke, and also “the opportunity to not destroy LessWrong” seems like a silly phrase (kind of similar to “a little bit the worst thing ever”). On reflection, yep, you are getting an opportunity you don’t normally get. But it’s also weird to have an opportunity to perform a negative action.
Also, it still seems to me that there’s no reason anyone who was taking it seriously would blow up LW (apart from maybe Jeff Kauffman). So if there’s a real risk of someone blowing it up, it must not be that serious.
I’m genuinely confused about the “pressing the button for entertainment value”.
The email contained sentences like:
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.
I resonate with basically all of this from Chris’ post
Trying to introspect a bit more, I think that unseeing the cultural context is hard, and that that context massively affects your priors of how to interpret something like this. My first reaction was that the email was a joke. Then, realising it wasn’t a joke, being confused by why I’d been sent it (the email began Dear Neel_Nanda_1 , not Dear Neel, which made it seem less like I’d been specially chosen). And then, realising that they’d actually changed the Front Page, and done this before, being really entertained at the idea of celebrating Petrov Day in this way. But it felt like “this is a fun, slightly over the top way of celebrating, and we want to see interesting and fun things happen”.
I think my priors are so far from people taking something as minor as “the LW frontpage goes down for a day” seriously, that it took me reading the thread under jefftk last year about selling his launch codes for counterfactual donations, and seeing people genuinely debate “is this worth more than $1.6K” to realise that people took the symbolic value really seriously. (And I’m still pretty confused by this—if I had read about Petrov Day 2019, and saw that someone blew up the front page for a large donation to AMF, that would probably marginally raise my opinion of LessWrong. And I utterly do not understand people who would price as over $10K, let alone $1m)
Things that I think would have changed my intuitive framing:
Having the email drop out of “RPG flavour text mode” and be explicit about the cultural context and how seriously people took it
Having the downside be actually, meaningfully high (eg, LW the website going down for a month) ((though I think this is net bad for the obvious reasons)). As is, it didn’t feel like something to be taken seriously, because the actual stakes were low.
Being given context and invited before Petrov day, and needing to take some agency to accept. I think this would have made the notion of “you are being invited and trusted clearer”. I was surprised by receiving the email and don’t see myself as a notable LW contributor, and assumed eg this was automatically sent to the 270 most recent posters, or highest karma users or something, rather than having been hand-picked by Ben
(In writing all of this, I feel like I’m being unfair to Ben/implying all of this should have been obvious to you guys. That’s not at all my intent, and I hope you take this in the spirit of “an attempt to narrate my internal experience, that might help with orchestrating future things”)
Idk, hope all that helped. This kind of thing is far outside my standard conception of how people and communities work, and I’m not used to people taking symbols this seriously. And I’m surprised by how obvious this all feels to people with the cultural context
This comment helped me understand better what it looks like without the ‘cultural context’, thx.
Just to reply to one particular thing:
Do you agree that the literal monetary value of the site being down for a day is (likely) greater than that? Never mind the symbolism, there’s just like two thousand people who visit the Frontpage in a day, around half of whom might pay something in the range of $1-$10 for the site not to be randomly down on them for a day?
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.
Right. I’ll briefly reply to each point:
You don’t look at the LW Frontpage, and neither do GW users or RSS users. This means you and they are outside the set of 2,000 daily visitors, so your lack of inconvenience is not evidence about theirs.
(I don’t have any logs, may look into getting some. As we don’t have that info our uncertainty around that should be factored into the estimate.)
You not wanting to pay $1 if the site was down is indeed a datapoint. I think many people would be fine with an outage. (I still think many would find it irritating.)
I understand that you especially wouldn’t in the case of the symbolism. I’m just trying to pin down the object level effects, to understand what was at stake before counting in all the symbolism.
Overall I’m not certain, it’s plausible the number is lower...
I don’t know how many of the 2000 would do the same thing but switching to GW for the day was fairly obvious to me. On the other hand I use GW on and off so this maybe gave me an advantage but I think the post on surviving the outage suggested doing that too. Short of checking GW traffic I guess it’s hard to know how many did this.
It is noteworthy that I think the sort of person who would bother to pay a dollar to keep the site up is also the sort of person who disproportionately might use greaterwrong (or, for that matter, the /allPosts page). The frontpage gets a lot of views but I think most of them are people who aren’t using LessWrong that seriously.
I said earlier to Ben I thought the $3k number was at least plausible and seemed within an order of magnitude of right. But thinking more I do suspect it’s on the lower end of that order of magnitude I think there’s only a few hundred users for whom the LessWrong frontpage is actually enough-better than whatever else they might be doing that day that they might pay a dollar.
GW had about 40 additional users show up on that day (which corresponds to roughly 35% traffic increase)
If the entire site (not just the front page) was down, then I might on some days pay $1, if I was writing something where I wanted to cite/reference an older article. Otherwise, if I knew it would only last for a day, I would just wait it out.
Interesting. My intuition was “24 hours isn’t a long time, and it’s just the front page, people can surely come back later”. But while that’s a small inconvenience, $1 worth of inconvenience sounds plausible. So yeah, fair point! $1-10k actually seems like a fair value for this, thanks
EDIT: Reading the other comments on that point, it seems reasonable that LessWrong power users are best able to work around the outage, and the people who’d be most inconvenienced. And I expect most of those people to not know about GW (what is GreaterWrong anyway?), but this to correlate with caring less about the existence of LW. So I guess I’d lower the estimate a bit
https://greaterwrong.com is an alternate interface to LessWrong, implemented by… I think Clone of Saturn does most of the coding and Said Achmiz does most of the design work?
Same content, different design, slightly different set of features. (E.g. no karma change notification, no voting on tags, but comment navigation is improved.) I tend to use it over LW because it’s faster.
You can generally just replace lesswrong with greaterwrong in a URL.
Oh, thanks! That sounds really useful when LW is being slow on mobile
As someone who didn’t receive the codes, but read the email on Honoring Petrov Day, I also got the sense it wasn’t too serious. The thing that would most give me pause is “a resource thousands of people view every day”.
I’m not sure I can say exactly what seems lighthearted about the email to me. Perhaps I just assumed it would be, and so read it that way. If I were to pick a few concrete things, I would say the phrase “with our honor intact” seems like a joke, and also “the opportunity to not destroy LessWrong” seems like a silly phrase (kind of similar to “a little bit the worst thing ever”). On reflection, yep, you are getting an opportunity you don’t normally get. But it’s also weird to have an opportunity to perform a negative action.
Also, it still seems to me that there’s no reason anyone who was taking it seriously would blow up LW (apart from maybe Jeff Kauffman). So if there’s a real risk of someone blowing it up, it must not be that serious.