to build up a real tradition of not taking unilateralist action—sitting around and not pressing buttons.
I don’t really understand the analogy to the Unilateralist’s Curse here.
The UC is about a situation where an action can legitimately be considered to have both benefits and drawbacks, and someone may then do damage by unilaterally taking action when their estimate of the benefits is incorrectly larger than their estimate of the drawbacks (and people who estimate differently can only avoid taking action).
That doesn’t seem very analogous to this situation, where pressing the button only produces harm, and anyone who does press the button will be publicly shamed. Yes there may be some private benefits, such as a spite-motivated person getting some enjoyment. But as I understand it, the UC is supposed to be about a disagreement concerning public benefits vs. harm, so a private benefit just makes someone a troll, not a person taking unilateralist action.
So it’s hard for me to see how we would be practicing the act of not taking unilateralist action, by having a ritual where there’s no real tradeoff. You can’t practice making the right choice in a dilemma, if there’s actually no choice.
If we really did want to practice that, then there would need to be a corresponding benefit set up for pressing the button. Maybe something like: when someone presses the button, they get a pre-selected list of ten effective charities from which they choose one. Upon entering the correct launch code, the site goes down and the LW team makes a $10,000 donation to the selected charity, which they have precommitted not to donate otherwise. The person who submitted the codes remains anonymous.
I think you are overestimating the degree to which there was “no real tradeoff”. I bet with you that many people felt tempted to enter the launch codes, for reasons that Said mentioned, but also as a resource to be sold (like Jeff Kauffman considered).
Like, it’s obvious that if you didn’t do the thing with the codes, and just had a button available to every LessWrong user, someone would have pressed it “just for the lulz”, which isn’t a very good reason to press the button, but as you scale the number of people who are trying to balance the pros and cons, someone will think that the lulz are more important than not pressing the button (and I think “for the lulz” can be pretty validly described as someone doing something for the public good).
I was quite uncertain whether anyone would press the button over the course of the day, and don’t think that uncertainty was unjustified. And I would be surprised if you were confident at 90%+ that no one would press the button over the course of the day.
I do think that given how it worked out this time, adding a more concrete ritualized incentive seems maybe good to me, like giving $500 to a charity chosen by whoever presses the button.
I also don’t think the constraint of “what matters are only considerations about the public good” is a good constraints for a tradition like this, because in reality obviously many people will not only think about the public good, which actually significantly worsens the problems that the unilateralist curse is talking about, and it seems bad to not incorporate those into this tradition (and the UC is the best abstraction we currently have for talking about this reference class).
FWIW, I thought the ritual this year was fine and I’m not sure adding a cash prize to the ritual itself will be communicating the right lesson. It then starts to feel like a ritual about ‘do we care more about symbolism than about saving lives?’, rather than a ritual about coordination.
I’ve had pretty much the same objection to making Petrov day about UC and overall haven’t felt entirely satisfied with the counters. (Same with Petrov kind of being a unilateralist, though I moderately buy Habryka’s view that he was unilateralist with respect to local command structure but non-unilateralist with respect to humanity.) I generally have felt averse to what feels like dilution of the meaning of UC to something much closer to simple defection.
However, there is a way in which there is kind of disagreement about public benefits in the recent LW button scenario if you can sell your ability to nuke the site to someone who is a troll or motivated by spite, and then use the funds for something you think is good that outweighs the harm. At last Jeff K considered this but was dissuaded by others thinking it was a bad idea.
I like your donation/anonymity suggestion. The public shaming seems like a strong disincentive that disanalogizes the scenario from real world scenarios without this element (or where action would at least draw obvious praise from many).
The other direction is having an “opposing” site that our button takes down and vice versa plus chance of false alarm to more accurately resemble the history (though that is still more what I’d call a standard game theory/cooperation/defection thing than UC).
I don’t really understand the analogy to the Unilateralist’s Curse here.
The UC is about a situation where an action can legitimately be considered to have both benefits and drawbacks, and someone may then do damage by unilaterally taking action when their estimate of the benefits is incorrectly larger than their estimate of the drawbacks (and people who estimate differently can only avoid taking action).
That doesn’t seem very analogous to this situation, where pressing the button only produces harm, and anyone who does press the button will be publicly shamed. Yes there may be some private benefits, such as a spite-motivated person getting some enjoyment. But as I understand it, the UC is supposed to be about a disagreement concerning public benefits vs. harm, so a private benefit just makes someone a troll, not a person taking unilateralist action.
So it’s hard for me to see how we would be practicing the act of not taking unilateralist action, by having a ritual where there’s no real tradeoff. You can’t practice making the right choice in a dilemma, if there’s actually no choice.
If we really did want to practice that, then there would need to be a corresponding benefit set up for pressing the button. Maybe something like: when someone presses the button, they get a pre-selected list of ten effective charities from which they choose one. Upon entering the correct launch code, the site goes down and the LW team makes a $10,000 donation to the selected charity, which they have precommitted not to donate otherwise. The person who submitted the codes remains anonymous.
I think you are overestimating the degree to which there was “no real tradeoff”. I bet with you that many people felt tempted to enter the launch codes, for reasons that Said mentioned, but also as a resource to be sold (like Jeff Kauffman considered).
Like, it’s obvious that if you didn’t do the thing with the codes, and just had a button available to every LessWrong user, someone would have pressed it “just for the lulz”, which isn’t a very good reason to press the button, but as you scale the number of people who are trying to balance the pros and cons, someone will think that the lulz are more important than not pressing the button (and I think “for the lulz” can be pretty validly described as someone doing something for the public good).
I was quite uncertain whether anyone would press the button over the course of the day, and don’t think that uncertainty was unjustified. And I would be surprised if you were confident at 90%+ that no one would press the button over the course of the day.
I do think that given how it worked out this time, adding a more concrete ritualized incentive seems maybe good to me, like giving $500 to a charity chosen by whoever presses the button.
I also don’t think the constraint of “what matters are only considerations about the public good” is a good constraints for a tradition like this, because in reality obviously many people will not only think about the public good, which actually significantly worsens the problems that the unilateralist curse is talking about, and it seems bad to not incorporate those into this tradition (and the UC is the best abstraction we currently have for talking about this reference class).
FWIW, I thought the ritual this year was fine and I’m not sure adding a cash prize to the ritual itself will be communicating the right lesson. It then starts to feel like a ritual about ‘do we care more about symbolism than about saving lives?’, rather than a ritual about coordination.
I’ve had pretty much the same objection to making Petrov day about UC and overall haven’t felt entirely satisfied with the counters. (Same with Petrov kind of being a unilateralist, though I moderately buy Habryka’s view that he was unilateralist with respect to local command structure but non-unilateralist with respect to humanity.) I generally have felt averse to what feels like dilution of the meaning of UC to something much closer to simple defection.
However, there is a way in which there is kind of disagreement about public benefits in the recent LW button scenario if you can sell your ability to nuke the site to someone who is a troll or motivated by spite, and then use the funds for something you think is good that outweighs the harm. At last Jeff K considered this but was dissuaded by others thinking it was a bad idea.
I like your donation/anonymity suggestion. The public shaming seems like a strong disincentive that disanalogizes the scenario from real world scenarios without this element (or where action would at least draw obvious praise from many).
The other direction is having an “opposing” site that our button takes down and vice versa plus chance of false alarm to more accurately resemble the history (though that is still more what I’d call a standard game theory/cooperation/defection thing than UC).