The second–and I think more serious–complaint around lack of opt-in is that it leaves people who object to the ritual with no good option. If you don’t press the button, you are tacitly cooperating with a ritual you object to; if you do press it, you’ll have destroyed value and be subject to serious social sanction.
Moreover, the organizers (me, EA Forum staff) have declared by fiat what the moral significance of people’s symbolic actions are. This goes beyond just deciding what the ritual is and into deciding what’s good and bad symbolic behavior (with strong social consequences). While the Petrov Day ritual might be innocuous, it is a scary precedent if LessWrong/EA Forum organizers freely shape the moral symbolic landscape this way, without the checks and balances of broader community discussion.
My suspicion is that the people who felt this way would not have felt nearly this strongly if a random website did this to them. It was the combination of LessWrong/EAF asserting a frame and that LW/EAF had a particular place in their life where a frame felt like pressure (such as having a lot of respect for the team, or feeling like your friends take the ritual seriously even if you don’t).
This came up with Vavilov Day (more in private conversations than on LW). I intended to share it as a thing I was doing that maybe some people would also like (and pushed back when someone suggested making it a community-official thing), but some people nonetheless perceived it as a Community Event they had to either do, or conspicuously not do, or argue the community as a whole should not do (in fairness, the event blew up way more than anticipated, which is why I eventually created a thread for discussion in a community rather than personal context). In at least one case the person really wanted more strong community events, so no amount of me saying “no this is an individual event” made them feel better.
how so? 0_o
Somewhat described in the retrospective:
More on EAF.
My suspicion is that the people who felt this way would not have felt nearly this strongly if a random website did this to them. It was the combination of LessWrong/EAF asserting a frame and that LW/EAF had a particular place in their life where a frame felt like pressure (such as having a lot of respect for the team, or feeling like your friends take the ritual seriously even if you don’t).
This came up with Vavilov Day (more in private conversations than on LW). I intended to share it as a thing I was doing that maybe some people would also like (and pushed back when someone suggested making it a community-official thing), but some people nonetheless perceived it as a Community Event they had to either do, or conspicuously not do, or argue the community as a whole should not do (in fairness, the event blew up way more than anticipated, which is why I eventually created a thread for discussion in a community rather than personal context). In at least one case the person really wanted more strong community events, so no amount of me saying “no this is an individual event” made them feel better.
Thanks