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 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.