I wonder if commenter 2 had been given a code themselves, would the site still have gone down? They likely would have been less incentivized to sabotage the experiment simply because it’s no longer a challenge. I suspect they were primarily motivated by the excitement of successfully trolling/red-teaming LW. It’s not fun when the admin gives you an easy way to do it, but if it’s challenge (you have to fool someone to take the site down), then that’s a different story.
So perhaps the problem is not that the launch codes were given to too many people but rather to too few.
Beyond that, loyalty and trust are also very important to me. If the admins had trusted me with the launch codes, I wouldn’t have nuked the site (intentionally).
But, well. While it seems plausible to me that he’s telling the truth… I also think the actions he took are evidence that he’s the kind of person who would say that kind of thing whether or not it’s true.
I wonder if commenter 2 had been given a code themselves, would the site still have gone down? They likely would have been less incentivized to sabotage the experiment simply because it’s no longer a challenge. I suspect they were primarily motivated by the excitement of successfully trolling/red-teaming LW. It’s not fun when the admin gives you an easy way to do it, but if it’s challenge (you have to fool someone to take the site down), then that’s a different story.
So perhaps the problem is not that the launch codes were given to too many people but rather to too few.
He said:
But, well. While it seems plausible to me that he’s telling the truth… I also think the actions he took are evidence that he’s the kind of person who would say that kind of thing whether or not it’s true.